Memento Mori
by queenofnoise
Summary: n., pl., memento mori; A reminder of death or mortality. A reminder of human failures or errors. B/E, AU. Reupload.
1. Prologue

**Author's Note: Re-upload because I've decided to start writing again. This will be a test for me meeting deadlines, something I've never been particularly wonderful at accomplishing, but I guess it's something I'll have to learn at some point. This is me throwing myself in at the deep end.**

_**If you're looking for a happy ending, you won't find one here.**_

**_n._, _pl._, memento mori;**

**A reminder of death or mortality.**

**A reminder of human failures or errors.**

**Memento Mori**

_Prologue_

She is running.

Footfall after footfall, I hear her pounding down the long hall leading to the front door, the sound echoes and reverberates throughout the house. Dropping my grandmother's ashen, leathery hand, I follow her. My bare feet slap against the wooden floor in a sticky rhythm, my short and tired legs covering only half the distance my mother takes in a stride.

The setting June sun slants through the window above the front door, casting the foyer into a patterned glow of hued and fragmented light that catches specks of suspended white dust, floating peacefully amid the confusion. For a moment, I can see her running towards the rays, as if darting into the sun. The tendrils of sunlight reach for her, wrapping and enclosing her in a golden glow, the fingers of light threading around her. She disappears for a moment, enveloped in the ethereal radiance.

I throw my hands up to block the scorching sun, suddenly imagining it searing into my flesh and burning me to the bone. I yell for her, calling her name. She answers with a strangled cry of her own.

Her voice is anguished, pained. I'm overcome with the will to go to her, to circle my arms around her shoulders and tell her I love her like the words mean something – as if they are healing. 'To bits', I would add and kiss her hair. I reason that if I could do that, if I could just _get _to her, everything would be alright.

I drop my hands from my eyes and blink against the offensive rays. Spots of blue and green cloud my vision, but I can see her. A silhouette against the light, she is standing still – a heroic figure. Her shoulders jump with labored breaths as another choking wail tears from her throat, echoing in the cavernous hallway.

From my childish height, the Georgian window is a halo. A flame that burns around her, casting me in shadow - an eclipse.

It's traumatic, it's painful. It is the carefully constructed and perfected ideals of my young life falling to ruin. It is the foundation upon which I built my faith crumbling to a breathy dust. It is my mother, my strength, caving in and collapsing into madness.

She was my strength, but she had none to call her own.

For the first time, I realize that my mother is human. Like me, she is vulnerable and mortal. Age was the only weapon I had given her to only thing that could fight off her inevitable death. The fact that she was my mother was her only defense. I realized then that she was not infallible, not invincible. She was human. She was nothing special, when it came down to it. She was no longer the immortal, protective force that I had stood as my white knight and savior, but a frail and delicate child – standing in drowning tears in the hallway.

She was broken down to pieces. I wondered briefly if I had followed through on my promise, if I had truly loved her to bits.

I can feel my grandmother near me, the familiar smell of fresh peppermint and sweet apples wafting to me. Feebly, I hold out my hand. I feel her long nails graze my skin and I know she is there, watching her daughter fall apart. She is as helpless as I am.

My mother moves then. She is a streak of color, darting towards the door to her right. It's gray with dust, her hand prints dragging white streaks of clarity across its neglected surface. Her pale hand grasps the brass doorknob, her fingers pale with tension, the blood in her veins disrupted.

She pulls, but the door does not give. She tries again, this time setting her free hand against the wooden door frame for some sort of leverage. Still, the door does not surrender.

She looks at it in disbelief, a pleading look that chills me to the bone. Then there is a moment of frenzied shaking, of strangled yells and guttural snarls and punches raining down on the wooden surface, her fists pounding and fingernails bleeding, before she falls silent and exhausted from her assault. Her hand trails the length of the door as she slips to her knees, raking against the grainy timber. She rests her head against it, whispering as if spilling secrets to the room, swimming in the newly roused dust. Her hand falls from the doorknob and to her side, trembling upon release. She turns her head from the wood and stares through me, her cheeks and lips red – her eyes black.

"It's him," she whispers, her eyes burrowing holes in my chest, her lips barely moving. "It _has_ to be him."

Her lips part wider and there is static. I wonder if perhaps I'm dreaming. Is the ringing merely a merciless alarm come to rouse me from this nightmare? Was my brain short circuiting, were my ears deceiving me? But as she tumbles gracelessly to the floor, curled against the threshold and shaking in violent shiver that knocks her knees against each other with cracking force, I realize my hearing is perfectly fine.

There is no static, only screaming.


	2. Sit tibi terra levis

**Author's Note: Re-upload because I've decided to start writing again. This will be a test for me meeting deadlines, something I've never been particularly wonderful at accomplishing, but I guess it's something I'll have to learn at some point. This is me throwing myself in at the deep end.**

**If you're looking for a happy ending, you won't find one here.**

**Memento Mori**

_Chapter One_

**sit tibi terra levis;**

may the earth rest lightly on you

It was raining. Sheets of silver and black water cascaded down upon us, piercing our blackened clothes. A huddled group of figures cowering under umbrellas, we were a Renoir painting. The one he painted at his crossroads, his transition from impressionism back to his original classicism. There was the sharpness of the umbrellas, their points and edges stabbing and tearing holes in the gray sky, and the smudged confusion of those in the background – blurred by the mirrored icy facets of the December rain.

Renoir's transition reflected my own. From a life filled with bright and flickering streaks of color in an alternately hued world of impressionistic tendencies, we were cast into a quiet morbidity of past ideals. Both pinned into what was expected of us, both struggling with finding a balance. It figured that I would only relate to some one who lived almost a hundred years ago, a traitor to my generation.

The only difference I could really see between us was that Renoir's change had been self-imposed, 'self-inflicted' I recalled, remembering the text from my high school Art History notebook. His biography was scrawled somewhere in between the doodles of dramatic eyes with golden irises and carefully plotted ivy stems that snaked around the horizontal lines and wound around the margins, choking the page. I had never really kept up with the passages, too caught up in examining the paintings – and feebly trying to recreate them. I would trace their lines and curves over and over again with both eye and pencil, until some one noticed and I would shuffle in my seat uncomfortably; merely gawking inappropriately when asked of the differences between impressionism and post-impressionism. It certainly came as a surprise for me to remember these things now, of all times.

Below us, only a few feet from the glistening toes of our polished boots, a dark rectangle had been cut into the earth; six feet deep and fast flooding with a murky water that seeped from the walls of her muddy cell. At it's head, sinking into the blades of slick grass and withered weeds, a lone tombstone stood gray and unremarkable, marking the resting place of an unremarkable woman. There was no verse on the stone, no sentimental soliloquy or inspiring quote. No angels or carvings of religious interpretation marred the clear-cut edges of the porous gray. There was only her name and the dates that marked the beginning and end of my mother's time on this earth.

Water trickled down the face of the slab, running in and out of the beveled black lettering, slithering into the grass like lazy tears. Her coffin sat in suspension above the grave, black and smooth. Upon it, my grandmother had placed a single white rose, weathered and ruined as if it were thrust into existence of only sheer will and a prayer. The perfect, paper-thin petal detached itself from the cut stem and found it's way to a gathering pool of water, before following the stream of rainwater down the side of her wooden prison and drifting into the awaiting abyss below.

Only vaguely aware of the preacher's ongoing sermon, I watched as the metal pulleys gave in to reluctant submission, their rusty gears grinding as Renée's coffin descended into the soil. It disappeared then, out of my range of vision. Suddenly panicked, I took an instinctive step forward. Mike's hand found mine, grasping at my skin, his fingers enclosing mine in a death grip. I had no life in me to squeeze back. She descended further into the darkness then, down so deep that not even the sliver of sunlight that cracked the thunderous clouds could reflect off the lacquered surface of the coffin.

I disappeared with her into oblivion.

My head swam in condensed and heady thoughts; drowned in kaleidoscope images of swirling hues and long-forgotten memories, floating in violent currents before my eyes. Submerged; sound and sense slipped from the world, and thus, slipped from my grasp.

Men and women in simple work suits, darkened and patterned by the falling rain, each caught a fistful of sand from the graveside mound and cast it into the depths; whispering words of prayer and blessing before turning and disappearing through the trees where they could escape the stench of death. There was not one of those down turned faces which I could recognize, and not one that I could recall again once they had turned away, their figures retreating. I watched, standing still and stunned, as the muted glint of the shovel passed through the moisture filled air and scattered a cascade of brick-like chunks of dirt into the grave. It was only with the dull thud of earth hitting wood that my heart continued its halted beat and stuttered back into its intended rhythm, bringing with it a new found clarity that thrummed slowly through my veins with a searing, scarring burn.

Mike's hand clung to mine still, even as his own parents paid their respects and filtered into the mist and haze. I could feel his gaze, feel his eyes surveying mine; waiting for a falter, for the tears I knew would never fall. If I let him, he would stand unwavering by my side until we both fell to exhaustion, loyal to the point of death. The soft skin of his thumb lay over my own and he shifted his fingers to lie in between mine, gripping tightly once more. Now that I was aware of it, I could feel his pulse through his skin, the gentle thump-thump of his beating heart brush against my wrist. His was so much stronger than mine; a healthy, resounding beat instead of a weak and reluctant hum.

I watched – detached – as each figure flitted by, a jittery and grainy image in black and white, letting the rain splash my face and run down my cheeks. I let the water pool at my shoulder and drip from my hair, felt it trace veined patterns along my neck and down my back. There, it chilled my ones and stuck my clothes to my sodden skin. My teeth were chattering, crashing against each other in seizure like fashion; I ground them together to keep them from cracking against each other, putting more pressure on Mike's hand in tension.

He interpreted it as my due sign of grief, and as swiftly as I could believe possible, his free hand was pulling my head into the place where his neck disappeared into his drenched shirt. His fingers immediately knotted into the tendrils and strands of my hair. Against his neck, it was suffocatingly warm - a welcome change to the past few weeks of cold houses and colder stares – and I could not help but inch myself closer, seeking the heat that had been plucked from my body what seemed an age ago.

'Bella.' He caressed the words, 'you should go home.'

I didn't correct him, I didn't feel like there was any need to. The words hung empty and bare, reminding us both that I didn't know where home was anymore. I didn't need his well-placed offerings of shelter and comfort to add to my steadily growing reserve of guilt. If I left with him, I would be using him – and I would be the only one to see a problem with that. I answered him with an deliberately unintelligible murmur and reluctantly pulled away from the welcome heat his body provided. I disentangled our hands and took a step from him, the wind shaking the rain like a sheet between us and the cold crept back into my bones.

If we had been any less familiar of each other, he would have offered to take me home himself. He would have given that common courtesy and I probably would have accepted out of politeness. But he did know me. Now, there was no one left in the world who knew me better than he did, and instead of insisting, he just nodded briefly. Hesitating a moment, he folded his hands in the cloth of his jacket pockets as if he wanted to say something; his mouth opening as if to let the words out. Looking over my shoulder, he closed it again with another nod, and turned to follow the mourners before him into the darkening dusk.

It was a taste, a palpable feeling, in the air; the rules of our relationship had changed again.

The mist swirled and spun in currents around my ankles; the evening air crisp, wet and chilling. The spindly branches of the bare trees tossed and scratched at the heavens, their knuckles and tips raking the clouds like outstretched hands. A lone yew tree stood healthy and regal among the premature saplings and naked oaks that skirted the newly added grounds of the cemetery. Since the Early Christian era in Europe, yew trees had been synonymous with death and burial. It was a rare occurrence where one would find a graveyard in want of a yew tree. Evergreen and majestic, the tree stood for eternal life – the life after death. Yet something told me you wouldn't find a yew tree in heaven. Or wherever that 'other place' turned out to be.

There was a soft padding of careful, hesitant footsteps behind me and, despite the numerous passed years, I knew exactly to whom those feet belonged. So that was what had scared Mike off. It was as familiar a sound as if I had head it everyday of my life, and not only at the occasional family funeral or awkward Christmas dinner. Yet despite the familiarity, there was something different to the sound. It took me several moments to register the alteration in the steps, the subtle change that made all the difference. The realization came upon me slowly, because it was something I already knew. This time, the footsteps were growing louder, instead of fainter. _This time_, it was him approaching – coming _towards_ me - and not leaving me.

The footsteps stopped just short of me, so close that if I glanced sideways I could see the sheen on his newly polished shoes and the blades of caked grass and mud that found their way into the seams of the leather. His body blocked out the wind, if only momentarily, but offered no further warmth.

'He's right, Bella. You should go home.'

'Charlie,' I acknowledged him. 'I didn't expect you to come.'

He didn't respond, my father never answered to his given name – at least to me. It was either 'Chief' or 'Dad', and he certainly had no jurisdiction here, under either title.

'You didn't call,' I continued, picking at my fingernails.

'I know, and I'm sorry,' he said, reaching out a weathered hand to stop my nervous fidgeting.

'Don't be,' I snapped, abruptly pulling away from him. '_Your_ absence wasn't mourned.'

Or noticed, I mentally added.

'Your mother wouldn't like your attitude,' he huffed, shuffling on the spot, his foot digging into the dirt like a foal scratching their hooves in anticipation.

He was trying to take on a parental tone - authoritative and commanding – but his voice only came across as vinegary and bitter.

'Don't you dare try to tell me what Renée would or wouldn't like. You don't know her.'

'I _didn't _know her.'

That was what I had said. Wasn't it? Scowling, I shoved my hands in my pockets before he could try and hold one of them and retraced what I had said. Awkwardly, I ambled back over my words – trying to see where I had stumbled.

'You used the present tense, Bella,' he sighed, burying his own hand in his pocket – escaping the bitter cold. 'Renée isn't around anymore.'

I turned my face to look at him then. To truly look my father in the eye, _seeing him_ for the first time in almost two decades. I had only childhood memories of him, biased and subjective by my innocent, forgiving mind – these memories couldn't be relied on. I didn't know this man, he had just been playing a part. The awkward, bumbling father who showed up on your birthday with the wrong age on the card and an airport gift under his arm. He was a stranger to me. All we shared was blood. All he had ever given me was twenty three chromosomes and a nervous wreck for a mother. I owed him nothing.

And yet he stood before me as if we had been something ...better. Something more than just biological father and biological daughter. He stood there - in his black tweed suit and garishly busy paisley tie, with a hideously forced look of remorse and pity pasted across his face – as if he mattered to me. As if we had ever been a family.

As far as I was concerned, there were three members in my family; there was Gran, myself and my dead mother. There was no room left for him, and there never would be. He had sacrificed his place in my life the day he turned his back on Renée, and no amount of delayed or well-intended apologies could entice me into forgiving him. Fighting back a sneer, and suddenly, fighting back tears, my eyes found their way to his shoes again.

'I know that,' my voice was a whisper lost in the wind, the words coming out through clenched teeth.

'Honey let me fix this. I know I never did anything for you.. or your mom. But let me fix it. Come and live with me – a new beginning, a fresh start. Come and live with me in Forks.'

'Honey' he had called me. It was a wonder he didn't choke on the sentiment. It was a wonder I wasn't already walking away.

_No. _My mother was dead. The world was devoid of wonder of any sort.

The weight of his calloused hand leaned on my shoulder. I instinctively flinched, and he let his hand fall to his side again before letting it join the other in the confines of his pockets and continuing.

'Despite what you think, Bella, I did _love_ your mother.'

'You had a funny way of showing it.'

'You and I both knew your mother well enough to know she would never want us fighting. Especially now. We're all each other has got.'

I turned my head away from him completely then, tearing my eyes from his shoes, scanning for an escape route. Over the wrought iron fence, and through the thick of tree trunks, I could see my grandmother. Huddled over a cacophony of lilies, she was meticulously arranging them at the foot of a gravestone despite the whipping winds that shook her silver ringlets loose from their pins. Her skirts swung around her as she stood and looked over her efforts with a satisfied smile, pleased with her work, appearing as a woman unaffected by such a recent loss.

Ignorance was bliss, such was the way of my grandmother.

'You're wrong, Charlie.' My tone was rigid, bitter, 'I still have Gran.'

With an overwhelming sense of rightness, of power and satisfaction, I walked away from him. For the first time, it was him watching me leave, watching me disappear. Never knowing if I would return again. And, though the winter air was chilling, my back burned as his eyes bore holes into me. If I could take control of one thing in my life from this point forward, it would be to never see him again. It was a promise to myself that I vowed to keep above all else.

As I made my way to her, I noted all around my grandmother had been cast into varying hues of blue; the colors filtered and choked into submission, allowing the mournful tone to reign supreme. The gate in the fence partitioning the old and new sections of the cemetery creaked in protest as I swung it open, careful to avoid the sharp spear-like forms that ran along its upper edge. The sound alerted my grandmother to my approach, and her face turned quickly to appraise mine.

Looking upon her for the first time, a stranger would not tell of any loss in her life; her cheerful expression and carefree demeanor betraying the riot of emotions that I knew raged under her skin. She hid behind the perfect presentation of a neatly ordered woman. She was elegant and proper – Seattle's Grace Kelly – and would not dare to show anything less than a calm and unaffected disposition.

What others saw as detachment or denial, I saw as strength.

I envied her ability to shut away everything, her objectivity driving me to the point of insanity.

It was as if I was suffering alone.

For the third time today, a hand reached out to take mine. And this time, I willingly took it, nestling my head against her shoulder.

She had taken off her pink suede gloves, I noticed, when she had begun arranging the lilies. Frozen to the touch, her fingers were ice, and sat delicately in between mine. Black dirt and wet soil had found its way into the think folds of her skin, sitting in the wrinkles, and had nestled in amongst the stones in her engagement ring, caking under her long fingernails. In her hands, a black rosary was tangled, standing out against her floury, ashen skin. Now that the rain had passed, so to had her grieving period.

'Charlie wants me to live with him,' I said, spinning the ring around her frail fingers.

'Your mother joined _her _father today,' she sighed. 'Maybe it's best you do the same.'

'I couldn't leave you, Gran. I don't even know him.'

'These things take time, chérie.'

'He's already had eighteen years.'

'Then give him nineteen,' Gran cracked a smile then, the skin by her eyes creasing and folding like crumpled paper. 'Don't give up hope, child. Your mother never did.'

'Neither did your grandfather,' she continued, nodding at the grave. 'And he hasn't given up hope on you.'

With our hands still held, she passed the rosary to me, bending my fingers over the beads. Her brown eyes mirrored my own, and I saw in their depths my own face – and I saw it was a mirror of hers. I did not wear the passing years on my skin as physically as she did, but my grief showed. Dark circles hung like crescents beneath my eyes, following a purple circular motion into the curve of my eyelid. My cheeks were waxen and pallid, and my lips looked as if they were darkened with blood.

'Dum spiro spero,' she whispered.

Her hands left mine then, and she turned on her heel, slowly ambling her way past grave after grave, each one become older and more weathered than the last as she made her way towards the imposing church. Her eyes were trained on the skies, watching as the sun broke through the last of the clouds. She was the only person I could image doing so without tripping or stumbling over her own feet, she had made the journey many times before – her aging feet had cut the path here.

My legs folded beneath me, buckling now that I was finally alone.

I gripped the rosary as tightly as I could, my nails cutting claret crescents into my palm. Placing the black beaded chain against the petals of the lilies, my eyes traced over my grandfather's name.

'Dum spiro spero' she had said. _While I have breath, I hope._

It was something I could live by. My mother and grandfather had died, their breathing ceased – who knew if they still hoped? My grandmother was full of life, full of desire for the future.

But my breaths were labored, my hope was forced. I sat on the line between life and death, and I would fall one way or another before long.

As I placed the rosary against the chalky petals of the lilies, two drops of rainwater hit the skin of my wrist in unison.

The rain had stopped, but the tears were just beginning.


	3. Fluctuat nec mergitur

**Memento Mori**

_Chapter Two_

**fluctuat nec mergitur;**

she is tossed by the waves, but is not sunk

The house is empty without her; emptier than it should be. A third of our family is missing, yet it feels as if all of us have died with her.

With each opening of the front door, a gust of wind surges forth and breathes into the furthest corners of the house – bringing with it the damp and the cold. It shakes the cobwebs in the high ceilings and rattles the aging bars of the banister in their slots. Time and time again, we're forced to prick crispy browned leaves from the carpets, their spindly and sharp points slicing and jabbing at the linty green material, refusing to release their hold from the floor. The windows are greasy, more streaked and clouded than usual, and it seems that every crumb that falls from our lips gathers on the kitchen floor or down the side of the furniture, smothered in between the cushions. Day by day, it becomes more and more unmanageable and, day by day, it becomes more and more clear that, without her, we are both lost.

Each picture of her lay face down, a sheet of dust settling upon the felt that lined the back of each frame. Gran had gone from room to room after the funeral, carefully rearranging the photos that lined each surface, delicately handling each one as if it were made of whispers. Images of my mother graduating, playing at the beach, pictures of her holding me as a child - all of them now kissed the shelves and tables they once sat upon, hidden from view. I had never realized before, but it was slowly becoming apparent that it was my mother that kept us all together, kept us sane. The house had always seemed magically spotless and full of joyous glee before she passed, now falling to disarray in her absence, neglected by her remaining tenants. Our home was fractured.

Gran and I rarely spoke. We had lost the link between us; the thread that laced her generation with mine was frayed and broken, and we kept to ourselves. She never left the house. She padded around upstairs between her bedroom and my mother's, wearing a path in the carpet, only venturing downstairs for breakfast or to find some clean clothes. Neither of us answered the door. We rotted together in our lonesome misery for a while, until Gran received an invitation for a reunion in Portland. Foolishly, I urged her to go. I convinced her that I was healing, that the wounds didn't hurt anymore. I pushed and encouraged her until my lies became truths, and then she too was gone.

I had thought the house couldn't possibly feel more empty, but I was wrong.

Mike had called seven times since the funeral, six of which I ignored. On the seventh buzz of my cellphone in the week following the burial, I relented and pressed the offensive green button, connecting the call. He had nothing to say once I answered, stunned that communication had finally been made, as if he had interpreted an alien signal or finally decoded some secret message; he was speechless. But he did not hang up. Nor did I. His breath came in over the line, with the faint chatter of a radio in the background, but no words passed between us. It was immediately comforting, just to hear the _breathing_ of a living person. To know that somewhere, outside the walls of my mother's home, beyond the realm of the prison I had locked myself in, there was life. There was progress, there was movement. Past the property lines of my tomb, there were people; laughing, crying, thinking, loving. Life went on, even though I had abandoned mine completely. And so I cowered between the icy sheets in the drafty corner of my room, with the phone pressed forcefully against my ear, just listening to the sounds of life from the other end, before I drifted off to sleep.

My dreams were flooded with the thoughts I strangled in my waking moments. Every word I shoved into the back of my mind - every idea or notion I kept imprisoned behind closed lips - fought it's way to the surface and swam through my nightmares. Incomprehensible images floated behind my eyelids, barely discernible from the darkness, forgotten as soon as seen, except for the dark figures I saw crawling on the ceiling, reaching their grimy, twig-like fingers for me, snatching at my skin. Their teeth were yellow razors, hanging from their jaws like icicles from an overhang; framing the groans and snarls that ripped from their throats. Like bats, they always clustered on the ceiling; eyeless and black. In my dreams, I could feel them. Each grab at my throat was a slice through my skin, each bite of their teeth was a break of a bone, as if all the pain of Renée's death manifested in my dreams, leaving me numb during waking hours. But each morning I awoke, it was _my_ nails that stabbed into my arms; bruises and scars dotting and streaking across my pallid skin. Blood clung underneath my fingernails, and I would wake shaking, doused in a cold sweat, clammy and more exhausted than before I had slipped into the land of my fears.

The morning brought light, and with it, the continuation of life; though I cared for neither and instead found myself wishing for the night. My dreams brought the pain I couldn't feel when I was awake, and though it was insane; it was also healing. Facing the pain was more glorious than ignoring it. And as the nights passed, the number of terrors on the ceiling decreased; fizzling away. Bruises turned from purple to blue to yellow, the scars on my arms turned white, but the numb feeling prevailed.

It was as if I was incapable of mourning. Though I screamed and clawed for her in the darkness, the daylight brought with it a stoic and desensitized calm that lay like a blanket over me and divided me from the rest of the world. It was as if I had become but a river in the depths of winter; the surface frozen and rigid, seemingly peaceful, while underneath the river still raged and flowed with fervor and intent. But should a crack every appear in that flawless, falsely calm surface... I wasn't sure if I wanted everything to come flooding me all at once.

Most of the time, I wandered the house feeling drugged; like my limbs were tacked on with a simple stitch and my heart had withered into itself. My head felt heavy and full, and a static noise rang constantly in my mind, replacing the silence. I could barely discern words - like my ears were full of water - and only the long vowel sounds were coherent. I forgot dates, then days, eventually losing track of hours. I don't know when I stopped throwing up my meals, or when I stopped eating altogether. I saw food was just another obstacle prolonging the inevitable.

At least the hunger pains made me feel _something_.

In my head, I knew it wasn't healthy. That my whole lifestyle had become something so toxic and meaningless that it was a wonder I hadn't died yet. But somewhere in my mind that teetered on the brink of insanity, in the depths of my subconscious, I also knew that it was what I wanted. That I was too much of a coward to take my life any other way.

I was acutely aware that everyone thought I was actively trying to neglect my own basic needs, that it was all part of the greater plan of 'ultimate escapism', but it wasn't. It wasn't the will to deny myself even the basics of food and water, but the _lack of will_ to even _try _to continue living.

I didn't know how to anymore. There was no sense to the world. Colors were inverted, words lost their meaning, and the most menial tasks now seemed like immense and useless efforts. Angela and Mike called less and less, apparently convinced that I was handling things in my own way, that this was all just a phase that was about to pass - as if it were as fleeting as my sudden infatuation with tribal tattoos in twelfth grade.

Death wasn't a phase. There was nothing fleeting about it.

It was the ultimate finality; the only given in life. Yet I hadn't - and haven't since - met a single person who could tell me how to deal with death and its effects on those left behind.

I had never understood survivor's guilt before. I had always thought I would be thankful, praising of whatever force had chosen to save me, but not now. I would give my life now to save hers. There would be no pause for thought, no meditation on the subject. If you should ask me now, you would have my answer before the last words fell from your lips. I knew which one of us deserved to live. I always knew.

It was Angela who found me; catatonic and coiled up into myself, my bony knees somewhere near my chin. Smothered in sheets and paralyzed in self-pity, I remember groaning in protest, and feebly trying to maneuver from her grasp. I heard her voice through the haze then as she spoke to some one. Some one who didn't answer. Me.

Then darkness.

It was Mike's arms that lifted me from my bed, sometime later, when the light through my covered window began to glow with an amber tint. Still tangled in my blankets, he gingerly placed me into the backseat of his truck that had always smelled of shoe polish and fresh leaves. There was the dull thud of the doors slamming and then a flurry of hands wrapping me in a fluffy but threadbare blanket, before the rumbling sound of the engine purring into life. As the aging truck ground its wheels over the gravel down the driveway, I slowly opened my eyes, bracing myself for the light, to meet Mike's eyes. His hands brushed my hair from my forehead as he cradled me in his lap. It was Angela who drove, frantically trying to coax directions from some one over the phone as she made her way through midday traffic. And it was Mike's old Forks High t-shirt, the one that I had remembered buying for him, that I curled around my fist, and into the fabric that I let the first tears fall.


End file.
